A director in his ninth summer at a camp gets a phone call in the middle of July.

It’s about the investors and the ownership structure. It’s about a possible sale nobody saw coming. The call ends. He has 600 campers on the property who are expecting a great summer.

You probably already know which situation I am talking about.

It has been about as close to national camp news as anything in the space gets. I am not naming names here. The specifics matter less than the leadership question underneath.

The parent company was in trouble. The camp might change hands by fall. The deal is largely out of his hands. So is the decision about what happens next.

But because this is a camp, his actual job that night is the camp Olympics ceremony, and for the next several weeks it’s running camp for hundreds of kids while everything else plays out somewhere else entirely.

Most people writing about a story like this will land on grief. The possible loss of legacy. Alumni networks lighting up on Facebook. The end of an era. The industry version of this piece writes itself, and it lands as sad.

The camp story running underneath all of that is different.

The test this director was actually taking on the camp side, was whether he had built the kind of team that could absorb this and keep going. Whether he invested in his staff early enough to have people around him ready for the moment they had to run camp with less oxygen than usual.

Which brings me to a conversation I have all the time.

Some camps hesitate to invest in their people because they are afraid trained staff will just leave. It is one of the top reasons directors give when they explain why the staff development budget stays flat year after year.

When I say invest, I mean the specific stuff. Training days before staff arrive that actually teach them something. Real feedback conversations through the summer. Delegating meaningful decisions to mid-level leaders so they learn what running the camp actually feels like.

I ask them the same question every time:

Don’t you want to invest in them so they’re just ready for whenever curveball gives you?

Because curveball always comes.

A huge storm rolls in on Visiting Day
A key staff member walks out mid-session
Norovirus sweeps through a few of the cabins
Something big breaks and it wasn’t in the budget
Or a mid-summer ownership debacle nobody saw coming

That investment buys you a team that can run the camp on the tough day without the director having to be everywhere at once.

It shows up when a crisis hits.

In this case, that team delivered one of the best summers the camp has ever had. The leadership stepped into every gap that opened up. All those kids had no idea any of the bigger stuff was happening at all.

What is worth studying here is what the director did with his team while the sale played out somewhere else.

You do not know what you’re capable of until you’re in those circumstances.

So whatever quiet moment you have this fall to invest in the people around you, take it. It’s what makes your team ready when your own phone call comes.

Sincerely,
Dan Weir

Senior Consultant at Immersive1st

dan@immersive1st.com

#3. Get Your Financial House in Order First

Before a single resume lands in your inbox, make sure you know what you can afford to pay. Can you hand a finalist candidate a clean, readable budget and answer their question with confidence? Because they will ask, and they should.

Too many searches stall or sour not because the candidate wasn’t right, but because the organization wasn’t ready. Unclear financials signal instability. Unresolved cash flow challenges don’t disappear when a new director walks in the door...

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